Finding a Girl in America (23 page)

While he showered, Lori dressed and put on bacon. At breakfast he talked about last night's movie, about the day as it looked through the window near the table, about Plum Island's winter erosion, about the omelette, about anything, and Lori watched him with her soft brown eyes, and he knew she knew and was helpless, and he wished she didn't hurt that way, he knew the pain of being helpless with a lover, but there was nothing he could do except wish they both weren't helpless.

Driving the car, he is in love with Sharon, needs to see her, listen to her voice, touch her as they walk on the beach. At the house, Lori waits in the car, for she is shy about going in; she and Edith have talked outside, either because Edith was in the yard when they arrived or she walked with Hank and Sharon to the car and leaned over to talk to Lori at the window. Edith divorced him, and he has told Lori that she feels no jealousy or pain, but still Lori is uncomfortable. Hank understands this. He would feel the same. What he does not understand is why Lori loves him, and he prefers not to try, for he is afraid he will find no reason strong enough for him to rely on.

It is not the age of his body that makes him wonder. In the past three or four years, love handles and a bald spot have appeared, and all his running has no effect on the love handles, and he knows they are here to stay, and the bald spot will spread like a tonsure. But it isn't that. It's the fettered way he is thirty-five. When Monica left him, she flared after a night of silence when her eyes in turn glowered and sulked; she said, as they were finishing their last drinks in the bar near her college in Maine:
I want out. You worry about your writing first, your daughter second, money third, and I'm last
. All evening he had known something was coming. But he had never been broken up with so cleanly, precisely, succinctly. At once he was calm. He simply watched Monica's face. She was taut with fury. He was not. He was not even sad yet. He watched her, and waited for whatever he was going to say. He had no idea what it would be. He was simply repeating her words in his mind. Then he said:
You're right. Why should you put up with that shit?
Her fury was still there. Perhaps she wanted a fight. Yet all he felt was forgiveness for her, and futility because he had loved a woman so young.

Then he felt something else: that his forgiveness and futility were familiar, coming from foreknowledge, as if on that first night he took her to dinner in Boston and they ate soft-shelled crabs and his heart began to warm and rise, he had known it would end; that at the most he would get love's year. It ended with the four sentences in the bar, his two the last, and they drove quietly to her apartment near the campus; at the door he embraced her more tightly than he had intended, because holding her he saw images of death, hers and his years from now, neither knowing of the death of the first, the odds bad that it would be him since he had fifteen years on her and was a man. Then he gave her a gentle closed-lip kiss, and was walking back to his car before she could speak.

He put Waylon Jennings in the deck, and on the two-hour moonlit drive home he longed for a beer and did not cry. When he got to his apartment he drank a six-pack with bourbon and did cry and nearly phoned her; all that kept him from it was his will to keep their last scene together sculpted forever with him, Hank Allison Goddamnit, showing only dignity and strength and tenderness. She had seen him as he was now, on nights when writing or money or guilt and sorrow about Sharon or, often enough, all three punched him around the walls of his apartment, and he counter-punched with one hand holding a beer, the other a bourbon on the rocks. But she had never seen him like this because of her. So each time he went to the kitchen to get another beer or more bourbon and looked at the phone on the wall, he remembered how he was and what he said when she told him in the bar, and how he was at the door, and turned, sometimes lunged, away from the phone.

He drank in his bedroom, at his desk but with his back to it, and he listened to Dylan, the angry songs about women, the volume low because he rented the upstairs of a house whose owners were a retired couple sleeping beneath him, and he started his cure: he focused on every one of her flaws, and with booze and will and Dylan's hurt and angry encouragement, he multiplied them by emotion until they grew so out of proportion that he could no longer see what he had loved about her. He relived her quick temper and screaming rage, so loud and long that some nights he was afraid she was going mad, and always he had to command her to stop, squeeze her arms, tell her she would wake the couple downstairs; and her crying, never vulnerably, never seeming to need comfort, more a variation of her rage and nearly as loud, as she twisted from him and fled from room to room until again he had to hold and command; and the source of these rages and tears never defined so he could try to deal with them, these sources always just a little concrete but mostly abstract so on those nights he felt the impotence of believing she already was mad; and his impotence brought with it a detachment which in turn opened him up to shades of despair: he imagined her ten years from now, when her life would be more complicated and difficult, when it would attack her more often, with more strength. Listening to ‘Positively Fourth Street' he sipped the smooth Jack Daniel's and chased it with the foamy bite of beer and thought if she had stayed with him she would have so drained his energy that, after spending his nights as a shrink and a lion-tamer, he would wake peaceless and weary to face his morning's work. He recalled her mischievous face as, in front of his friends, in bars or at the beach, she pinched his love handles or kissed his bald spot. This usually did not bother him because he was in good condition, and she smoked heavily and could not run half a mile, was slender only because she was made that way, and she was young, and she dieted. And he guessed she was doing this for herself rather than to him; testing herself; actually touching his signs of age to see if she really wanted a man fifteen years older, with an ex-wife, a twelve-year-old daughter, and child support.

Beneath the teasing, though, something was in her eyes: something feral, and at times as she smiled and teased he looked into her eyes and felt a stir of fear which had nothing to do with her fingers squeezing his flesh, her lips smacking his crown. It was more like the detached fear he had once, looking at a Russell's viper in a zoo, the snake coiled asleep behind glass, and Hank read the typed card on the cage, about this lethargic snake and how one of its kind finally got Russell and his name.

He went to the kitchen, did not even look at the phone as he passed it. He was thinking of the snake, and one night Jack saying that after the one bit Russell, he wrote down the effects of the poison as it killed him; and Jack said:
You know, maybe he studied those bastards so long that finally he had to go all the way, know it all, and he just reached down and touched it
… In the dark bedroom which tomorrow would still be a bedroom, a dreary and hung-over place, not a study as it became most mornings, he listened to ‘Just Like a Woman' and thought
Maybe that's what I was doing, waiting for that hitch to give me the venom, end it between us, between me and all of them, between me and
—He stopped. It was time to finish the drinks, swallow aspirins and vitamin B and go to bed, for—had he completed the sentence in his mind—it would have concluded with some euphemism for suicide. He went to bed hating Monica; it was a satisfying hatred; it felt like the completion of a long-planned revenge.

He woke with relief, nearly happiness, nearly strength. He knew, for today, that was enough: last night's cure had worked. As it had with every young girl who left him since his divorce. They all left. One night he told Jack:
I think I'11 get a fire escape up to my window, so they can just climb out while I'm taking a piss
. When Edith sent him away, he did not have a cure.

Five years ago, when all his pleas and arguments and bargains and accusations lay on the living room floor between them (he actually felt he was stepping on his own words as he paced while she sat watching), and he knew that she really wanted him to leave, he believed it was because he had been unfaithful. So his grief was coupled with injustice, for she had had lovers too; and even as Hank talked that night her newest and, she said, her last lover so long as she was married, was dying early of cancer: Joe Ritchie, an ex-priest who taught philosophy at the college where Hank worked.

When he moved to his apartment he was too sad to be angry at Edith. He tried to be. Alone at night, and while running, and watching movies, he told himself that he and Edith had lived equally. Or almost. True, he had a head start on her, had student girl friends before she caught him because he was with a woman more demanding: a woman not only his own age but rich and from Paris, idling for six months with friends in Boston; a woman who laughed at him when he worried about Edith catching him. Now, at thirty-five, with eight years' distance, he saw how foolish he had been, for she was a woman of no substance: her idea of a good day was to sleep late, buy things at Bonwit Teller or Ann Taylor, and make love with Hank in the afternoon. He was young enough to be excited by her accent, so that he heard its sound more than what it said. He saw her in Boston, on Saturday afternoons, on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he was supposed to be in his office at school, he got careless, and he got caught.

When it happened he realized he had always known that someday it would: that he could not have lived uncaught his entire life, or until he outgrew his crushes that so quickly turned to passion not only for the body, for that lovely first penetration into new yielding flesh, but for the woman's soul too, a passion to know as much of her as he could before they parted (they were students; parting was graduation) and went on with their lives. Sometimes for weeks, even months, he would not notice a particular girl in class. Because while he was teaching he was aware mostly of himself: this was only partly vanity; more, it was his love of teaching, his fear of failing, so that before every class he had stage-fright, had to spend a few minutes in silence in his office or walking about the campus, letting his apprehension and passion grow inside him until, entering the classroom, those were all he felt. When he began to speak about a novel or story, it was as though another man were talking, and Hank listening. He taught three afternoons a week, had many bad days when he became confused, lost the students, and seeing their listless faces, his apprehension overcame his passion and he fearfully waited, still talking, for the fifty minutes to pass. At a week's end, if he had had two good days out of three, he was satisfied. He knew that hardly anyone hit three for three in this work. On his best days he listened to Hank the teacher talking, and he tried to follow the ideas coming from his mouth, ideas he often didn't know he had until he heard them. So, usually, he did not notice a certain girl until she said something in class, something that halted him, made him look at her and think about what she had said. Or, while he was talking, his face sweeping the class, the windows, the ceiling, his hands busy with a pen or keys or coins, his face would suddenly stop, held by a girl whose eyes were fixed on his; sometimes he would stop speaking for a moment, lose the idea he was working on, as he looked at her. Then he would turn away, toss his keys or coin or pen in the air, catch the idea again as he caught the tossed object, and speak. Soon he would be talking to her on the campus.

In his thirties, he understood what those crushes, while he was married, had been. His profession was one of intimacy, but usually it went only from him to the faces sitting in the room. Any student who listened could know as much about him as all his friends, except those two or three truly deep ones. His crushes were rope bridges, built in haste between him and the girl. It was a need not only to give her more of what attracted her in the classroom, but to receive from her, to know her; and with the beginning of that, talking on the campus sidewalks or in his office, came the passion to know all of her. The ones he chose (or, he realized in his thirties, the ones who chose him) were girls who would have been known as promiscuous when he was in college; or even now in the seventies if they were salesclerks or cashiers and at night went to those bars where the young men who had gone to work instead of college drank and waited. But they were educated, affluent, and well-travelled; they wore denim to class, but he knew that what hung in their dormitory closets and in their closets at home cost at least half of his year's salary. He never saw those clothes until he was divorced at thirty and started taking the girls to Boston for the evening; and then he rarely saw the same dress or skirt and blouse twice; only a favorite sweater, a warm coat. While married, his lovemaking was in his car, and what he quiveringly pulled from their thighs was denim. They all took the pill, they all had what they called a healthy attitude toward sex, which meant they knew the affair with Hank, as deep and tender as it might be, so that it certainly felt like love (and, for all Hank knew, it probably was) would end with the school year in May, would resume (if she and Hank felt like it) in the fall, and would certainly end on Commencement Day.

So they made it easy for him. He was a man who planned most days of his life. In the morning he wrote; then he ran, then he taught; then he was a husband and father. He tried to keep them all separated, and most days it worked, and he felt like three or four different men. When the affairs started, he made time for them as well. After class or instead of office hours he drove through town where the girl was walking. She entered his car as though he had offered her a ride. Even when they left town and drove north she would sit near her door until he turned onto the dirt road leading to the woods. Going back he stayed on the highway, skirted the town, approached the school from the south, and let her out several blocks away. Then he went home and hugged and kissed Sharon and Edith, and holding their bodies in the warmth of his house, he felt love only for them.